Blog: Pete Loshin

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Microsoft Open Source not so open?

One of Microsoft's tried and true competitive strategies is to "extend and embrace" the competition. With open source, this has taken the form of creating Shared Source Licenses. Two of them, the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) have even been approved as OSI compliant by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

In theory, software released under either of those licenses is as "free" (in the open source sense) as Linux, Firefox, or any other open source software. Meaning that you could look over the source code any time you liked, for example.

That's the theory.

In practice, apparently, it's not so clear, at least in the case of the Sandcastle project. Sandcastle is a documentation compiler for Managed Class Libraries, hosted at Microsoft's open source project hosting web site, CodePlex. You might wonder, What are the requirements for hosting a project on CodePlex? #1: choose a license (per the FAQ link, the implication is you need to choose an open source license), and #3: there must be source code.

Sandcastle, ostensibly released under the Ms-PL, doesn't come with source. Yet. The story came to my attention via Reddit, here. The big questions seem to be whether an OSI-approved license can be used to release software without source code--because the Ms-PL seems to somehow not refer to source code, while still supposedly being an open source license!

Stay tuned for more about this; there will probably be more links to meta-websites where open source issues are discussed, as well as responses from various other sources. I'll have more to say/write about this--let me know what you think!

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